Making Waves

work in progress

• Frontrunners in Estonia: Bolt partners with Stellantis aiming at 100,000 autonomous vehicles by 2035. Veriff hits $100m revenue, now profitable, growing 80% YoY, gets to chat with Y Combinator. Estonian tech now is brings 4.3% of GDP.
• Art. Justas Janauskas and Adomas Narkevičius launch Upe Foundation – starting with connecting curators across Baltics and the UK (FT coverage). Darius Lebedzinskas partners with Dainius Sciuka to launch Ourluci. There is much more tech people in arts these days, Hostinger partners with MO, and many other founders / startups collect or support galleries.
• New ventures, our favorite section
  • Daivaras Anuzis and Karolis Rosickas team up in Singapore to build Trialo – and transform how the life sciences industry leverages clinical evidence.
  • Danielius and Alanas launch Ogvio – money transfer service build on stablecoins.
  • Martynas Strabeika launches Stage Forward: will focus on game development, and as a first step.
  • Martynas Pocius is the founding engineer at Drafted – design your home with AI.
• Vilnius Lyceum has given us a lot of great tech founders – list by Matas.

• Consumer AI. As OpenAI goes Code Red with Gemini accelerating, who will win consumer AI race? Next year we will see hardware product launches, and Meta just acquired AI pendant startup Limitless (former Rewind). Perfect moment for Fieldy as they are just accelerating.

• Security. Dominykas launches V-Formation: next-generation security platform powered by crowdsourced intelligence — from AI agents to security researchers. Buck4Bug, first Baltic Bug Bounty service provider, joined Plug and Play accelerator recently.
• Hackathon. Elevenlabs worldwide hackathon in Vilnius, too – today (Dec 11) already. You're invited to watch the chaos unfold, doors open 8:30pm (don't come earlier, builders need focus). Link to demo night event. Thank you, Bek Ventures, for sponsoring the event! (Bek Ventures is an early-stage, generalist fund with impressive track record: they back the most ambitious founders with origins from Central and Eastern Europe).

• Exits. Fun Kipras Gajauskas story on how he had a €2M deal for the company, watched it crash to €20K, then clawed way back to €500K. Corporate M&A can be brutal.
• People. Julius Narkus joins IPRoyal as new CMO (8 digits of revenue and 60% YoY growth). Domantas joins Comma Capital in New York through a year-long fellowship (brings sakotis). Arminas Banys joins CoinGate board. Matas Ramanauskas joined freshmango OÜ accelerator as a Mentor and Fundraising Expert. Gabriela from Supermetrics joins Whatagraph.

sponsors

Cloudvisor [AWS partner dedicated to startups]
Hostinger [online presence accessible to everyone worldwide, hiring]
Google For Startups [cloud credits up to $350K, expert support & faster growth]
Oxylabs [Step into the world of web data gathering]
VIALET [Business accounts for growth, hiring]
Ace Waves [Enterprise ready AI agents for CS, hiring]
Surfshark [Top 50 among fastest growing in EU, hiring]
15MIN Group [all the news you need to know]

rounds and capital

• ALGORI raised additional €3.6m to expand their solutions internationally – with customers joining the recent round as investors. Red Bull Ventures, Tech Transfer Agrifood, Coinvest Capital and existing VC backers Shilling VC, Change Ventures, Flashpoint, FIRSTPICK pulled together this round.
• Aneli Capital launches publicly with EUR 35M fund, to invest across Lithuania, Poland, Baltics and CEE in early stages. Average ticket should be around 1.5M. Aneli capital roots are with Business Angel Fund II, which they also manage.
• Brite lands another bit of investment from Lithuanian Sharks, but they are already well-backed (founders still maintain majority), profitable and plan to hit EUR 14M revenue next year.
• Latvian NATRIX UGV, developer of modular unmanned ground vehicles, has received a €250K loan from SEB.

three questions

Thrilled to meet repeat founder Antanas Baksys, Co-founder and CEO of Ace Waves - fast growing startup. They built multi-agent AI platform for customer support.

What is Ace Waves and how does it differentiate in the CS market?

We build customer-facing AI agents that resolve support issues end-to-end. At the core is our multi-agent orchestration engine: we deploy AI agents into a company’s existing helpdesk, train them to follow real business procedures, and give them access to the same tools humans use. They work in chat, email and phone.

That's not a decision-tree chatbot that we are all allergic to. Our AI agents work exactly like trained support reps - just 24/7, in any language, and at a fraction of the cost.

You have early traction – which company types are getting most value now?

Our strongest traction is with consumer companies that run high-volume, high-complexity customer service operations. These teams sit in the “war zone”: large support volumes, growth, fragmented systems, and customers who expect instant resolution, not another chatbot that escalates to a human or 5 minutes hold on a phone.These companies get the most value because our AI agents can handle their real procedures end-to-end, at scale, without expanding headcount.

How has SearchNode exit influenced your approach to building this new company?

SearchNode was our school of enterprise software. We learned how to build, sell, and scale complex systems. Now the goal is to build a generational company.We are very excited about the timing. AI adoption inflection point is finally happening, after years of hype, best AI products can now deliver real end-to-end customer service automation. Very few teams still know how to do this in production at scale, and passing 1M ARR this early is proof we’re one of them.We bootstrapped SearchNode, but in AI enterprise software the winner is whoever moves fastest and builds the best product. That’s why we’ve raised a big round but we're going to announce all these news next year, now heads down working on a few other large events to happen as we move so fast.

roleplay

founder's guide

• Ways to improve Granola notes
• How to spot a top 1% startup early
• Some GOAT stories from Airwallex ("Stripe offered to acquire us for $1.2 billion when we had $2M in revenue. Today, we've raised $330M at an $8B valuation") and Clay ("It took us six years to go from $0-1m, then two years to go from $1-100m").
• Bilal Zuberi believes this is the time to sell your startup
• Stop LARPing is a really good piece.

further insights

• Stockholm becoming Europe's capital for capital
• Modern House of Brands: Why the Next Great Consumer Platforms Will Be AI-Native and Built for Synergy (feels like Tesonet and Kilo went this direction?)

ecosystem

• European tech must now build a power machine

So we need a different approach. For a start, there is just an enormous undersupply of media and culture to inspire a) aggressive founder ambition in the national interest and b) policy progress both in Brussels and across the continent, produced in different languages and tailored to countries’ local contexts.

Where is the founder-led, European bible of audacity, the cri de coeur, akin to The Technological Republic? Where is the high-variance grants programme for tech and economic progress writers, to kickstart the posting-to-policy pipeline across Europe? Where is the talent pipeline for political candidates? Where are the events — public and private — that get European tech and policy leaders organised?